Basketball reading for armchair coaches

It’s a great time of year for sports fans. Baseball is starting up, and football just finished with that great guessing game known as the draft. The Stanley Cup playoffs are underway, leading up to the NHL finals at the end of the month.

And as any Southern Californian who is remotely interested in sports knows, the marathon of NBA playoffs is underway. Will the Clippers or the Lakers move on? As of this writing, the Clips are in and the Lakers are making us bite our nails.

If the prospect of all these hard-fought games has you jazzed, the wait between games and rounds can be agonizing. One way for the die-hard fan to get through it all is with some basketball reading.

The thoughts and experiences of some of the top coaches in NBA and NCAA basketball offer insights into the game. And they often speak to the broader concepts of leadership, teamwork, discipline and success.

The primary example of this is one of our local heroes, 95-year-old John Wooden. Ten NCAA titles in 12 years for UCLA would have been enough to ensure his fame. But Coach Wooden also has published a number of books on topics including biography, basketball and leadership and management issues. A look at “My Personal Best” or “They Call Me Coach” will tell you why he is the only basketball hall of famer to be enshrined as both a coach and a player.

At the opposite end of the court, as it were, is “Bob Knight: The Unauthorized Biography.” Whereas Wooden is the epitome of the gentleman athlete, Knight represents another side of American sport. Though undeniably effective as a coach, Knight’s unpredictable personality has informed every aspect of his coaching career and his effectiveness in drawing the best out of his players.

Another coach in our own backyard is Phil Jackson, who has written several books. “Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior” is primarily about his term with the phenomenal Jordan-Pippen Bulls of the ‘90s. It is not so much about the players and the games as it is about Jackson’s theories, which include the triangle offense and selfless team play. He even mentions some clever tricks such as editing scenes from the Wizard of Oz into game films to make a point to the players.

In “More Than a Game,” Jackson focuses on his first championship season with an undisciplined, young Lakers team that went on to win three NBA titles. By the time Jackson published “The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul,” he had a sadder story to tell about dysfunctional egos and the collapse of a once-great team.

Some other informative and fun reads from coaches and former coaches are very high on lists of the best sports books. Dean Smith’s “The Carolina Way: Leadership Lessons from a Life in Coaching,” Jerry Tarkanian’s (also from our own back yard at Cal State Long Beach) “Runnin’ Rebel,” and ? from the granddaddy of them all ? Red Auerbach’s “Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game” are worth reading simply as good books.

They also offer valuable lessons that can be directly applied to our lives and our businesses. But most important, they can also fill in the seemingly endless gap between games.